Farm implements include harvesters, seed planters and other implements. Seed planters can be rather sophisticated pieces of equipment with subsystems for bulk filling of the planter, for metering the dispensing of seeds and for dispensing fertilizer.
Features in agricultural implements requiring mechanical power are often driven by hydraulic subsystems as disclosed in Killeen, U.S. Pat. No. 6,116,006, where a hydraulic system is disclosed for a harvester.
In Molzahn, U.S. Pat. No. 4,009,556, a third pump for supplying fluid to a crop harvester is located on the tractor and coupled to two other pumps for driving motors coupled to the wheels of the tractor. This system requires that hydraulic lines run from the third pump across a hitching gap to the farm implement. In a construction tractor disclosed in Stahl, U.S. Pat. No. 4,715,459, it has been known to connect three pumps together with one pump dedicated to auxiliary equipment being detachable from the other two. All three pumps are carried by the tractor.
Other agricultural systems providing hydraulic systems in whole or in part on the tractor are seen Bodie et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,182,588 and Susag, U.S. Pat. No. 5,918,558.
Although it is convenient to locate hydraulic pumps on the tractor, it then becomes necessary to connect hydraulic lines to hydraulic devices on any trailing farm implement.
It is also desirable that farm implements be sold in multiple configurations ranging from lower cost, basic function equipment to higher cost, multi-featured equipment.
A technical problem remains in how to arrive at a multi-featured farm implement that is relatively easy to configure for different levels of hydraulically driven functions.
Another technical problem is providing equipment that is easy to hitch up to a tractor, by a single operator.